Martin Shaw Reads His Underworld Essay

As both a mythologist and wilderness rites-of-passage guide I am frequently asked to comment on climate change, collapsing stories, and what on earth to say to our kids about the future. I am no kind of pundit, so choose my words sparingly and carefully. What follows is a few thoughts. Climate change isn’t a case to be made, it’s a sound to be heard. From a mythic perspective, seeing is often a form of identifying, but hearing is the locating of a much more personal message. Hearing creates

Martin Shaw Reads His Underworld Essay2022-03-11T15:14:54+00:00

The Hidden Country

New Year message from Dr Martin Shaw: Joe Strummer once told me not to lose a sense of the heroic. Not in some overbearing, strutting, macho manner, but in a quieter, more vocational register. That certain beautiful things needed defending, and that itself was an organising principle in the scattergun chaos of these times. That you figured out what you stood for. You set free a little morality but held back on the judgement. I’m not someone that peddles in despair or stirs up disorder and claims it

The Hidden Country2022-01-03T18:46:30+00:00

We Are In The Underworld And We Haven’t Figured It Out Yet

An essay by Dr Martin Shaw As both a mythologist and wilderness rites-of-passage guide I am frequently asked to comment on climate change, collapsing stories, and what on earth to say to our kids about the future. I am no kind of pundit, so choose my words sparingly and carefully. What follows is a few thoughts. *** The real horn being blown at this moment is one some of us simply cannot hear. Oh, we see — the endless television clips of crashing

We Are In The Underworld And We Haven’t Figured It Out Yet2022-03-11T15:13:21+00:00

Small Gods

We hear it everywhere these days. Time for a new story. Some enthusiastic sweep of narrative that becomes, overnight, the myth of our times. A container for all this ecological trouble, this peak-oil business, this malaise of numbness that seems to shroud even the most privileged. A new story. Just the one. That simple. Painless. Everything solved. Lovely and neat. So, here’s my first moment of rashness: I suggest the stories we need turned up, right on time, about five thousand years ago. But they’re not

Small Gods2020-12-10T19:54:18+00:00

Title

The Cista Mystica was a secret casket used in the mystery cults of antiquity, particularly in the rites of Dionysus. Contained within on a bed of rushes was a snake, the living god itself, utterly untamable.

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